I first saw the Kimkins Diet pop up in the Yahoo Answers Diet and Fitness category about 12 months ago. Someone calling herself “Kimmer” was trolling the diet-related questions and posting cookie-cutter answers touting an amazing new diet that was “better than Atkins.” The claims seemed incredible: weight loss of up to 124 lbs and zero need to exercise.

Being curious about this “miracle diet” I clicked through.

What I found was typical of a fad diet site: Unbelievable claims of dramatic weight-loss, the usual testimonials (predominately from women) with before and after pictures, and “Kimmer’s” story of how she went from fat to model-thin using her own “amazing” diet plan.

There were even before and after pictures of Kimmer demonstrating her own transformation from morbidly obese to svelte beauty. With her low-cut leopard top and smoky eyes, I had to admit Kimmer looked pretty hot. It was hard to believe she was the same woman in the grainy “before” picture who looked like she was steadying herself with the handrail to keep from falling over under all that extra weight.

I clicked back to Yahoo Answers, marked her post as “spam” and moved on.

Over the coming months, I saw a few questions about the “Kimkins Diet” here and there, posted some responses dismissing it as a unhealthy crash diet and recommended spending your $79.95 “membership fee” on some healthy, whole food.

I more or less forgot about it.

And then it hit. In June 2007, Woman’s World Magazine featured a cover story on the Kimkins Diet, complete with the pictures of glowing Kimkins success stories and the sensational headline “Better Than Gastric Bypass!”

Suddenly, Kimkins had gone mainstream.

What Is The Kimkins Diet?

The Kimkins Diet website describes the Kimkins diet as a “low-fat, low-carb” weight-loss program that “doesn’t require pills, special foods, expensive supplements” or “exercise.” It also presents itself as an alternative to costly gastric bypass surgery, which immediately throws up a red flag that the diet is targeting the most desperately overweight people — people who really need the help of a nutritionist and medical weight loss professional, not an Internet guru.

The Kimkins Diet also recommends limiting dietary fiber. In coaching emails to members, “Kimmer” advises against supplementing with fiber because it causes “weight gain” (what she actually is saying is that it causes the scale to show weight gain – fiber itself is not digested, so it has no meaningful calories and can’t contribute to fat-gain.) Instead, she recommends the use of laxatives to push through all of that meat and eggs her diet prescribes. Not a good sign.

At it’s core, Kimkins is a variation on the Atkins Diet. But where Atkins has you consume more fat as you reduce carbohydrates (the fat is then metabolized for energy), Kimkins tries to reduce dietary fat to extremely low levels, and has you consume the bulk of your calories in protein. While limiting dietary fat and carbs may seem like a dieting grand slam, it’s actually extremely dangerous at the levels recommended by Kimkins.

First, you need a certain amount of dietary fat to support your basic daily functions. And second, protein is not easily broken down for energy. In fact, high protein, low-fat and low-carb diets have a documented history of producing serious nutritional deficiencies, and in some cases have been actually been associated with serious (and sometimes fatal) conditions like sudden cardiac arrest.

In the 1960s and 1970s there were a rash of serious side-effects (and in at least one case, a fatality) associated with low-carb, low-fat, liquid protein diets. Autopsies suggested that two things may have been at work: serious electrolyte disturbances caused by the protein-only diet threw off heart rhythms in some dieters, causing cardiac arrest. In another case, it appeared that there was atrophy of heart tissue, probably the result of the extremely low calories, which caused the body to “feed” on it’s own tissue (including heart tissue) to meet it’s basic energy requirements.

Kimkins is not a typical ketogenic diet (like Atkins) because it dramatically restricts fat consumption along with carbs. Whether or not you agree with Atkin’s high-fat, high-protein approach, Atkins is very clear that reducing dietary fat on a low-carb diet is dangerous and their diet is at least structured to avoid this double-whammy. Kimkins makes no such allowances in their diet, and the complete lack of fruit, whole grains and dietary fiber is a recipe for disaster.

Would you lose weight on Kimkins?

Absolutely. The structure of the diet naturally limits calorie intake to radically-low levels, in many cases you’ll be eating under a 1000 calories a day, and maybe as few as 500. Anyone would lose weight at these extremely restrictive calorie levels. The problem is that like any fad or crash diet (for example, the Cabbage Soup Diet, Grapefruit Diet or Master Clense) you’d also be losing a lot of key nutrients, including essential vitamins and minerals.

Bottom line is Kimkins is a nutritional disaster with the potential for serious side-effects. And on top of that, you’ll be out $80 bucks to boot.

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Hi,
It’s Matt over at Answer Fitness. Just stopped in to see what the latest was on the Kimkins lawsuit. Glad you liked the article. One thing, it looks like the last link to Answerfitness.com is broken …

Keep up the fight everyone … this is one bad diet that deserves to get shut down, IMO.